From False Accusations During WWI to Real Atrocities

"This is how German lands will look like
if France reaches the Rhine" - German WWI propaganda

All's fair in love and war.  Anything to win, right?

German counter-propaganda showing
a German soldier sharing
his rations with French children.

And what is needed to make one win in war, but to turn one's soldiers into killing machines, than to vilify the enemy and turn the others into despicable monsters? No one's innocent in this terrible game. Everyone's guilty.

And so, the German generals during World War I, wanting to move as swiftly as possible through Belgium, while worried about free shooters (kinda like guerrilla fighters), had given orders to execute any suspect, and to terrorize the local populations.

To that effect, the most atrocious lies were spread about the Belgian people, tales transcribed by the Kaiser in his journal:

"...the Belgian population has acted in a most diabolical fashion, if not bestial, not one iota differently from the Cossack. They have tortured injured men, beat them to death, killed doctors and medical staff, fired (...) upon defenseless people while staying hidden themselves [...].

Belgium's conditions shall therefore become immensely more difficult." (1)

The lies worked. Atrocious acts were perpetrated against Belgium. So bad were they that they became part of what is now known as the "Rape of Belgium."

The numbers reported in history (2) are quite telling:

• 6,000 Belgians killed.
• 17,700 Belgians dead due to expulsion, deportation, imprisonment, or sentenced to death.
• 3,000 additional Belgians killed on the electric fences the Germans put up to prevent civilians from fleeing.
• 120,000 Belgians forced into labor for Germany, half of which were deported.
• 25,000 homes and other buildings destroyed just in 1914
• 1.5 million Belgians (20% of the population then) fled the country.

Child of 7 gunned down [by German soldiers]
Anti-German propaganda

University of Leuven Library before and
after the German invasion, 1914

It didn't matter who you were, or how old you were, any excuse was good to have you shot (although the vast majority of those killed were men of military age. Historians state (and probably rightly so) that, in addition to propaganda and their generals' directives, many other elements contributed to these atrocities, namely inexperience, lack of discipline, drunkenness, friendly fire incidents, collisions with Belgian and French troops, rage at the unexpected resistance the Belgians showed (indeed, Belgium was hardly considered a "real" country by the other nations at the time), hatred for the Catholic, looting, etc. (2)

To make matters worse, the Belgian civilians were forced to cheer the Kaiser and Germany (or be executed). While in the meantime the war was being portrayed in German penny papers as being semi-friendly, with violence being used only in emergencies. (3)

"Their way of doing war"
Drawing by Georges Scott

But the lies were on all sides. In France, the newspapers keep praising their own troops (thanks to the censors), erasing defeats or retreats, while calling the Boches (aka Germans) all the foulest names, saying that even their cadavers "smell[ed] worse than those of the French." (4)

Notes:

(1) Translated  by yours truly from French, passage taken from Max Gallo's 1914-1918 Une histoire de la première guerre mondiale.

(2) The Rape of Belgium article on Wikipedia.

(3) The 'German Atrocities' of 1914 by Sophie de Schaepdrijver

(4) Fact translated from the French article Propagande de guerre et patriotique et censure au cours de la Première guerre mondiale by Léon Belhassen.

The 10 Commandments Of A Belgian Employee At The End Of The 19th Century

I've been reading this really interesting book, La vie quotidienne en Belgique sous le règne de Léopold II (1865-1909) by Georges-H. Dumont, for research purposes, when I fell on this little tidbit I thought you guys might enjoy.

Belgian miners circa 1900. They were considered
inferior because they worked with their hands
and in the bowels of the earth.

Particularly for those of you who want to spot the differences (where have we improved in over 100 years), and the similarities (I assure you, some things never seem to change).
So, here goes:

1. Respect of God, cleanliness and punctuality are the rules of a well-ordered house.
2. As of now, the personnel will have to be present from 6 am to 6 pm. Sunday is reserved for religious service. Every morning, everyone has to say prayers in the principal's office.
3. Everyone has to do overtime if management deems it useful.
4. The oldest employee is in charge of the premises' cleanliness. The youngest must show up at his place, 40 minutes before prayer time, and are also at his disposition at the end of the day.
5. The clothing has to be simple. The staff cannot wear light colors, and must ware appropriate stockings. It is forbidden to wear rubber boots and fur coats inside the offices, due to the presence of furnaces and kilns. Exceptions in case of bad weather: scarves and hats. We also recommend everyone bring, during wintertime, four pounds of coal.
6. It is forbidden to talk during office times. An employee who smokes cigars, takes alcoholic drinks, goes to billiards rooms or attends political meets will be considered suspect with respect to his honor, his honesty, and his propriety.
7. It is permitted to take some sustenance between 11h30 and noon. However, work cannot be interrupted.
8. Employees have to show modesty and respect before clients, management and representatives of the press.
9. Each staff member has the duty to keep good care of his own health. In case of illness, a salary will not be paid. We recommend everyone to save a good part of his pay so that, in case of inability to work, and in his old age, he will not be dependent on the community's goodwill.
10. And to finish this, we would like to draw your attention to the generosity of these new rules. We expect from it a considerable increase in work.

Lovely, isn't it? And one of the many reasons I do not wish to travel back in time... What are your thoughts?

The rules were translated from the Règlement de bureaux et chancelleries (private collection), or the rules the poorly-paid
office and chancellery employees had to follow. As you can see, as stringent as the rules a "lower" miner had to follow, so
no reason for them to feel superior. Yet superior they did feel.

Feminism

Campaign for women's suffrage in Belgium, 1908.
Source: Getty Images

Feminism (n.):
Belief in or advocacy of women's social, political, and economic rights, especially with regard to the equality of the sexes.
(source)

Ah, what a dangerous word to (rightly or wrongly) bandy about these days. Or has it always been so?

In any case, the role of women in Belgian society, and particularly their rights and how hard they had to fight to get them, is the subject of this post.

Before Belgium's independence, when its states were under the control of Napoleon I, women weren't considered for much else except for reproduction purposes (or for men's pleasure, depending on which strata of the society you happened to belong to). For though he was behind great changes for his country and revamped the French legislature, among other things, Napoleon didn't believe those rights were meant for the "inferior sex."

A Century Of Freedom...And Political Changes

Albert Devèze

"A [political] party does not have a reason for being unless it possesses its own ideal which it pursues with  the conscious and tenacious effort to progressively achieve it, an ideal which is susceptible to arouse within its adherents enthusiastic impulses and fervors of faith.
Does that mean the party must adhere to an immutable dogmatism, whose rigid rule will be the norm of its activity? Definitely not. It must, on the contrary, understand that when it comes to translating its idealism into positive laws, that these can only be the legislative raiment adapted to the measure of the social being who wears it; that this collective being, through internal and external transformations, suffers all the phenomena of growth and development, health and sickness, and that yesterday's impossibilities must consequently become today's possibilities and tomorrow's inevitable. If such is not that party's concept of politics, it would soon become a power of blind conservatism first, of reaction next. From then on, its decline would sanction its divorce from the people's material and moral necessities whose destinies it would have the pretension to hamper."

~Albert Devèze, Un siècle de libéralisme

(transl. by A. Ellefson)

After the Catholic Party, it is the Liberal Party that is the oldest political party in Belgium, having been officially formed in 1846, followed by the third of the three major parties, the Socialist Party, which was founded in 1857 (although, with time, these have split and reformed into many other parties).

The Belgian Popes

From 1789 to 1929, the hamlet of Lodomez, near Luxembourg, has had its own pope.

It all happened because of the French revolution (1789-1799), which on top of having a number of noble heads rolling had also taken upon itself to de-Christianize the country. But despite the reign of terror imposed by the revolutionaries, many kept their faith. And in Lodomez, it is the farmer Antoine Hurdebise who took over for the exiled ecclesiastics, assembling everyone for prayer, baptizing newborns and giving the last sacraments, and that despite the new edicts forbidding it. It is therefore no surprise that the abandoned parishioners started calling Hurdebise "le pape."